I Don’t Know
Sermon given at the Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
April 2, 1017
by The Rev. Craig M. Nowak
A couple of weeks ago I was having dinner with some friends and the subject of ancestry came up. One friend, who was adopted, said she didn't know who or where her ancestors were from. Another friend suggested she get one of those ancestry DNA kits where you send in a saliva sample and get back a report that tells your ethic roots.
She bristled at the idea, however, saying it didn’t matter to her because in heaven our ethnicity is irrelevant. To that response, another friend joked, “What makes you so sure you’re going to heaven?” The friend who had suggested the DNA test though, asked in a more serious tone, “You really believe in heaven?” As the conversation continued, it was inevitable that my friends, assuming me to be the resident expert on such matters, would turn to me for, if not the definitive answer, at least a more authoritative one.
Well, imagine their disappointment when they turned to me and asked, “Is heaven real?” and given the context in which the idea of heaven was presented, I replied, “I don’t know.” I mean, to my knowledge there’s only one way to find out and I’d rather not rush it. Admittedly, I do have some thoughts about it, but in the end I really don’t know. And I’m okay with not knowing.
There was a time, and there are still moments, however, when I really struggle to utter the words, “I don’t know.” It’s a response to life and life’s questions that many don’t like or won’t admit. Which, as comfort seeking creatures, is understandable. For if knowledge is power, as is often assumed, to say, “I don’t know”, is to stand humbled, exposed, vulnerable. Not a comfortable feeling in the least.
Another reason people do not like hearing or saying, “I don’t know”… We live in the information age! Its almost like there’s no excuse not to know…at least for very long. Indeed, how often have you or someone you’re with pulled out a smart phone for the purpose of answering, proving or disproving an answer to some question.
We love answers. Especially quick, easy ones. Some blame technology for our seeming impatience with not-knowing. Our smartphones and other devices, however, are not the problem. We are. Or, rather, the way we are conditioned to be intolerant of life’s intensity and ambiguity. This doesn’t matter all that much if you’re trying to settle a dispute with a friend concerning whether the capital of Idaho is Boise or Coeur d’Alene (It’s Boise by the way…check your phone…later). But it does matter with larger, deeper questions.
Since humankind came onto the scene, we have have been confounded by, sought to explain, and attempted to impose or discern an order to the experience we call life. Over time, mythologies, religions, and the sciences have all been enlisted, in part, to satisfy our desire to make sense of life, to provide answers that will decrease the intensity and remove the ambiguity of our experience.
Today our cup runneth over with religious dogmas, doctrines and creeds and scientific theories, formulas and equations. More than ever before in human history, we have so much information…and yet…yet, still so little satisfaction. For despite all our seeking, acquired knowledge, and reasoning, life retains an intensity and ambiguity that lies beyond our grasp. What we’re talking about here is mystery.
Mystery is at the heart of the Robert Frost poem “Choose Something Like A Star” set to music by Randall Thompson and sung by our choir this morning. (It is one of my favorite poems and pieces of music…thank you to Lila and the choir for taking it on) The poem begins, humbly enough, acknowledging, “Some mystery becomes the proud.” but soon anxiously insists, “But to be wholly taciturn/In your reserve is not allowed” and then a demand is made, “Say something to us.” Something, “we can learn/by heart and when alone repeat.” Like a rote prayer, dogma or doctrine. But the star, like the God Moses knew, who identified itself as “I am”, simply replies, “I burn.” The poet, dissatisfied wants more…more information… “Tell us”, he insists, “…with what degree of heat.” … And more clearly…”Use language we can comprehend…Tell us what elements you blend.” A shift occurs when the poet realizes, that even knowing these…having the “answers” so to speak, “gives us strangely little aid.” And in ceasing his demands, the poet comes to discover and find comfort in, what minister and author Frederick Buechner describes as, “a mystery whose truth is itself the mystery.”
Indeed, Buechner notes, “There are mysteries you can solve by taking thought.” He offers a murder mystery as an example, “whose mysteriousness must be dispelled in order for the truth to be known.” But, as I just noted, he also says, “There are other mysteries that do not conceal a truth to think your way to, but, whose truth is itself the mystery.” Buechner offers our self as an example of such a mystery, noting, “The more you try to fathom it, the more fathomless is it revealed to be.” “Thus,” Buechner notes, “you do not solve the mystery, you live the mystery.”
Living the mystery is another way to describe the spiritual journey or spiritual life. Contrary to popular notions, the aim of the spiritual journey is not to construct a faith dependent upon certainty, but to inhabit a faith without certainty. An acceptance and appreciation for the intensity and ambiguity of life. Writer Annie Dillard describes it this way,
“In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters down, if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power of evil, the unified field; our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned.” (Dillard, A Stone To Talk).
No one’s spiritual journey is the same, but nearly every spiritual journey begins as a fact finding mission…born of a desire for answers. Early on, it takes on an quality of entitlement, like we see in the initial demands made in Frost’s poem…an insistence life reveal its secrets to us. This search…even insistence, on answers occupies much of what the spiritual teacher, Richard Rohr calls, the first half of life. A time when we need and seek reliable “rules” to help us navigate a complex world.
The potential sources of these are many, from the more normative - family, tradition, and culture- to the more extreme- fundamentalist ideologies, for example, be they religious or secular, far right or far left. But in time all of these become objects of rebellion, crumble apart or turn into idols requiring all consuming fortification and defense.
But as the answers we were given or thought we had found come up short, begin to fall apart and we tire of mounting defenses, we learn, as Mary Oliver writes, to keep our distance from those..be they people or ideas…who think they have the answers and instead, she says, keep company always with those who say “Look!” and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads.” Here questions don’t cease, they shift. No longer is our focus on solving mystery through the acquisition of answers and rules, but instead on resolving to appreciate that we live with mysteries too marvelous to understand…where as Oliver observes,
…”grass can be nourishing in the mouths of the lambs….rivers and stones are forever in allegiance with gravity while we ourselves dream of rising.” Where “two hands touch and the bonds will never be broken….And people come, from delight or the scars of damage, to the comfort of a poem.”
Until we do this… indeed, unless we, as Starhawk writes in our first reading, “know (or live) the Mystery” all our seeking, yearning, and striving for answers will leave us wanting. She goes on to say, “If that which you seek, you find not within yourself, you will never find it without.” Then proclaims “For behold, I have been with you from the beginning, And I am that which is attained at the end of desire.” Starhawk's insight offers confirmation of Buechner’s observation, “There are mysteries that do not conceal a truth to think your way to, but, whose truth is itself the mystery.”
As our spiritual journey continues into the second half of life, “I don’t know” emerges not as a frustrating admission of ignorance to be denied or “figured out”, but as what Richard Rohr calls, “an ultimate and humiliating realism, which…demands a lot of forgiveness of almost everything.” In other words, it is an expression of spiritual humility and maturity. It is a hard won maturity birthed by the experience and realization of what spiritual teachers like Richard Rohr describe as, “the tragic sense of life”, the realization and experience that life does not follow a neat, tidy or predictable path…that is it filled with paradox and contradictions.
This is the reality portrayed in the world’s sacred texts, our most profound literature, poetry, music, the arts and sciences. And the truth revealed in these is not, as humans have seemed so long to insist, the dogmas or doctrines we concoct at the surface, but that which is found in the depths. Which is: Somehow, even in our hardest experiences of not knowing…of humiliation, exposure, and vulnerability as human beings we do not journey, we do not live this mystery alone.
The resiliency of the world’s marginalized and traumatized offer compelling witness to this truth, as do all of our lives in their own way, if we dare pay attention and ”look!”, even “laugh in astonishment and bow our heads.”
If we do this…and it is by no means easy, we will, in time, come to see the spiritual journey is not a fact finding mission but a path of unfolding discovery. An adventure…an exciting, harrowing, wonder-filled, heartbreaking, inspiring, frustrating, salvific quest, “over the world’s rim” into the depth of our being. There we touch, “what our sciences cannot locate or name” and the limits of religion’s doctrines, dogmas and creeds are exposed…” the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest.” Something… like a star…or God…I don’t know…but Mystery, yes!
Amen and Blessed Be
Sermon given at the Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
April 2, 1017
by The Rev. Craig M. Nowak
A couple of weeks ago I was having dinner with some friends and the subject of ancestry came up. One friend, who was adopted, said she didn't know who or where her ancestors were from. Another friend suggested she get one of those ancestry DNA kits where you send in a saliva sample and get back a report that tells your ethic roots.
She bristled at the idea, however, saying it didn’t matter to her because in heaven our ethnicity is irrelevant. To that response, another friend joked, “What makes you so sure you’re going to heaven?” The friend who had suggested the DNA test though, asked in a more serious tone, “You really believe in heaven?” As the conversation continued, it was inevitable that my friends, assuming me to be the resident expert on such matters, would turn to me for, if not the definitive answer, at least a more authoritative one.
Well, imagine their disappointment when they turned to me and asked, “Is heaven real?” and given the context in which the idea of heaven was presented, I replied, “I don’t know.” I mean, to my knowledge there’s only one way to find out and I’d rather not rush it. Admittedly, I do have some thoughts about it, but in the end I really don’t know. And I’m okay with not knowing.
There was a time, and there are still moments, however, when I really struggle to utter the words, “I don’t know.” It’s a response to life and life’s questions that many don’t like or won’t admit. Which, as comfort seeking creatures, is understandable. For if knowledge is power, as is often assumed, to say, “I don’t know”, is to stand humbled, exposed, vulnerable. Not a comfortable feeling in the least.
Another reason people do not like hearing or saying, “I don’t know”… We live in the information age! Its almost like there’s no excuse not to know…at least for very long. Indeed, how often have you or someone you’re with pulled out a smart phone for the purpose of answering, proving or disproving an answer to some question.
We love answers. Especially quick, easy ones. Some blame technology for our seeming impatience with not-knowing. Our smartphones and other devices, however, are not the problem. We are. Or, rather, the way we are conditioned to be intolerant of life’s intensity and ambiguity. This doesn’t matter all that much if you’re trying to settle a dispute with a friend concerning whether the capital of Idaho is Boise or Coeur d’Alene (It’s Boise by the way…check your phone…later). But it does matter with larger, deeper questions.
Since humankind came onto the scene, we have have been confounded by, sought to explain, and attempted to impose or discern an order to the experience we call life. Over time, mythologies, religions, and the sciences have all been enlisted, in part, to satisfy our desire to make sense of life, to provide answers that will decrease the intensity and remove the ambiguity of our experience.
Today our cup runneth over with religious dogmas, doctrines and creeds and scientific theories, formulas and equations. More than ever before in human history, we have so much information…and yet…yet, still so little satisfaction. For despite all our seeking, acquired knowledge, and reasoning, life retains an intensity and ambiguity that lies beyond our grasp. What we’re talking about here is mystery.
Mystery is at the heart of the Robert Frost poem “Choose Something Like A Star” set to music by Randall Thompson and sung by our choir this morning. (It is one of my favorite poems and pieces of music…thank you to Lila and the choir for taking it on) The poem begins, humbly enough, acknowledging, “Some mystery becomes the proud.” but soon anxiously insists, “But to be wholly taciturn/In your reserve is not allowed” and then a demand is made, “Say something to us.” Something, “we can learn/by heart and when alone repeat.” Like a rote prayer, dogma or doctrine. But the star, like the God Moses knew, who identified itself as “I am”, simply replies, “I burn.” The poet, dissatisfied wants more…more information… “Tell us”, he insists, “…with what degree of heat.” … And more clearly…”Use language we can comprehend…Tell us what elements you blend.” A shift occurs when the poet realizes, that even knowing these…having the “answers” so to speak, “gives us strangely little aid.” And in ceasing his demands, the poet comes to discover and find comfort in, what minister and author Frederick Buechner describes as, “a mystery whose truth is itself the mystery.”
Indeed, Buechner notes, “There are mysteries you can solve by taking thought.” He offers a murder mystery as an example, “whose mysteriousness must be dispelled in order for the truth to be known.” But, as I just noted, he also says, “There are other mysteries that do not conceal a truth to think your way to, but, whose truth is itself the mystery.” Buechner offers our self as an example of such a mystery, noting, “The more you try to fathom it, the more fathomless is it revealed to be.” “Thus,” Buechner notes, “you do not solve the mystery, you live the mystery.”
Living the mystery is another way to describe the spiritual journey or spiritual life. Contrary to popular notions, the aim of the spiritual journey is not to construct a faith dependent upon certainty, but to inhabit a faith without certainty. An acceptance and appreciation for the intensity and ambiguity of life. Writer Annie Dillard describes it this way,
“In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters down, if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power of evil, the unified field; our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned.” (Dillard, A Stone To Talk).
No one’s spiritual journey is the same, but nearly every spiritual journey begins as a fact finding mission…born of a desire for answers. Early on, it takes on an quality of entitlement, like we see in the initial demands made in Frost’s poem…an insistence life reveal its secrets to us. This search…even insistence, on answers occupies much of what the spiritual teacher, Richard Rohr calls, the first half of life. A time when we need and seek reliable “rules” to help us navigate a complex world.
The potential sources of these are many, from the more normative - family, tradition, and culture- to the more extreme- fundamentalist ideologies, for example, be they religious or secular, far right or far left. But in time all of these become objects of rebellion, crumble apart or turn into idols requiring all consuming fortification and defense.
But as the answers we were given or thought we had found come up short, begin to fall apart and we tire of mounting defenses, we learn, as Mary Oliver writes, to keep our distance from those..be they people or ideas…who think they have the answers and instead, she says, keep company always with those who say “Look!” and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads.” Here questions don’t cease, they shift. No longer is our focus on solving mystery through the acquisition of answers and rules, but instead on resolving to appreciate that we live with mysteries too marvelous to understand…where as Oliver observes,
…”grass can be nourishing in the mouths of the lambs….rivers and stones are forever in allegiance with gravity while we ourselves dream of rising.” Where “two hands touch and the bonds will never be broken….And people come, from delight or the scars of damage, to the comfort of a poem.”
Until we do this… indeed, unless we, as Starhawk writes in our first reading, “know (or live) the Mystery” all our seeking, yearning, and striving for answers will leave us wanting. She goes on to say, “If that which you seek, you find not within yourself, you will never find it without.” Then proclaims “For behold, I have been with you from the beginning, And I am that which is attained at the end of desire.” Starhawk's insight offers confirmation of Buechner’s observation, “There are mysteries that do not conceal a truth to think your way to, but, whose truth is itself the mystery.”
As our spiritual journey continues into the second half of life, “I don’t know” emerges not as a frustrating admission of ignorance to be denied or “figured out”, but as what Richard Rohr calls, “an ultimate and humiliating realism, which…demands a lot of forgiveness of almost everything.” In other words, it is an expression of spiritual humility and maturity. It is a hard won maturity birthed by the experience and realization of what spiritual teachers like Richard Rohr describe as, “the tragic sense of life”, the realization and experience that life does not follow a neat, tidy or predictable path…that is it filled with paradox and contradictions.
This is the reality portrayed in the world’s sacred texts, our most profound literature, poetry, music, the arts and sciences. And the truth revealed in these is not, as humans have seemed so long to insist, the dogmas or doctrines we concoct at the surface, but that which is found in the depths. Which is: Somehow, even in our hardest experiences of not knowing…of humiliation, exposure, and vulnerability as human beings we do not journey, we do not live this mystery alone.
The resiliency of the world’s marginalized and traumatized offer compelling witness to this truth, as do all of our lives in their own way, if we dare pay attention and ”look!”, even “laugh in astonishment and bow our heads.”
If we do this…and it is by no means easy, we will, in time, come to see the spiritual journey is not a fact finding mission but a path of unfolding discovery. An adventure…an exciting, harrowing, wonder-filled, heartbreaking, inspiring, frustrating, salvific quest, “over the world’s rim” into the depth of our being. There we touch, “what our sciences cannot locate or name” and the limits of religion’s doctrines, dogmas and creeds are exposed…” the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest.” Something… like a star…or God…I don’t know…but Mystery, yes!
Amen and Blessed Be
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